01 September 2009

Welcome, new readers! You've missed some good shits!

I learned one thing from writing for Global Voices Online, that foreigners could be entirely ignorant of our most heated discussion in town. They told me that ideas like "compensated dating" are local and should be explained, even though there is a comprehensive Wikipedia entry here.

Anyway, I originally wanted to talk about something highly local in the next entry. But seeing that there're many others who came through the links from GVO and having more of you joined our Page at Facebook, it might be nice to devote an entry on what the hell the Pub is about.

If you look at the labels, we talked about issues related to drug tests, privacy, hypocrisy, compensated dating, prostitution, sexuality, pejorative, etc. You can see these are the more provocative, "darker" side of humanity.

The Libertines Pub is a moral mythbuster. Moralisation is what we worry about. As a moral mythbuster, we bashes moralists' vice. It encourages questioning of the accepted moral standards. It however doesn't offer you an alternative one. It encourages you to think for yourself. The only motto here is "sapere aude".

We think hypocrisy stinks and is itself the true immorality. Moralisation of the society is the petri dish of hypocrisy.

Morality, or moral reasons, are too often used as a weapon. It often serves certain political ends. The "moral", or actually immoral, attacks from the moral high ground effectively marginalise people. In the end, we just make our society worse. It might appear that all evil things are gone, but we have to admit that, we all have our darker side. It's only human. Marginalising the darker side is like sweeping the shits under the carpet. They're still there, and they stink even worse.

As our society gets more conservative, morality will be used as a weapon by our Big Brother. Before 1997, almost all Hong Kong people worried about the degree of control to our freedom the Communist government would bring to the city. However, we're now asking for more. We want our government to control what we read, to censor our movie posters, and to set up a prison like schooling.

We called ourselves Libertines Pub instead of Liberals Pub. Although we generally hold a liberal view, we do not want to feed you just another ideology. We want to liberate your thinking. We encourage you to think otherwise.

About the Pub

At the Libertines Pub, Hong Kong, you're invited to think otherwise. We are a bunch of rascals who got fed up with the herd mentality and would like to see you having the courage to think for yourself. Our sole objective is the liberation of your thinking through provocative, sometimes irritating, ridicule.